Thursday, March 21, 2013

The award, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, was established by four Internet titans led by Yuri Milner, a Russian entrepreneur and philanthropist who caused a stir last summer when he began giving physicists $3 million awards.

Cornelia I. Bargmann, who investigates the nervous system and behaviour at Rockefeller University.

David Botstein of Princeton University, who maps disease markers in the human genome.

Lewis C. Cantley of Weill Cornell Medical College, who discovered family of enzymes related to cell growth and cancer.

Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands, who has studies how processes in adult stem cells can go wrong and cause cancer

Napoleone Ferrara of the University of California San Diego, whose work on tumour growth has led to therapies for some kinds of cancer and eye disease.

Titia de Lange, who works on telemeres, the protective tips on the ends of chromosomes, at Rockefeller University.

Eric S. Lander of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leader of the Human Genome Project.

Charles L. Sawayers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who has investigated the signaling pathways that drive a cell to cancer.

Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, who discovered a protein that suppresses the growth of tumours and devised model for the progression of colon cancer that is widely used in colonoscopy.

Robert A. Weinberg of MIT, who discovered the first human oncogene, a gene that when mutated causes cancer.

Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, who has done groundbreaking work in developing stem cells.